


forgotten words

by morthael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Brief mention of homophobia, Character Study, Coming of Age, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Happy Ending, Japanese American Shiro, M/M, Other, Post-Canon, Post-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Psychological, Shiro's backstory, Shiro's culture, identity struggle, shiro's family - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28504365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morthael/pseuds/morthael
Summary: “I think you’ve been looking for a place to belong for so long,” Keith whispers, “That you’ve missed all the people already here to accept you for everything you are.”Takashi and Shiro through the years; and how they come together at last.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron), Mentions of Shiro/Adam - Relationship, Shiro & Shiro's Family (Voltron)
Comments: 50
Kudos: 112





	forgotten words

**Author's Note:**

> a shout out to Sharki and Abbey for their fics [homecoming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875695) and [aiga](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22344211) respectively, both of which inspired me to write this deeply personal take on Japanese-American Shiro.
> 
> The title of this was inspired by [Theme From Jerome (Forgotten Words)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgwrEg_xdd0&ab_channel=JoyfulNoiseRecordings) by Kishi Bashi (a Japanese-American artist! and I will not shut up about how much I love his music)

In this world, there are a few universal truths.

The first is that every single person has a different side that they show to the world, a different mask ready for every situation. It doesn’t have to be a conscious choice. It just is.

The second follows on from the first. Someone who only sees a person’s mask will never know what’s behind it.

The third is that, given enough time, a person will become their mask.

Takashi is five years old when he becomes Shiro.

He’s six months into school and hasn’t made any friends. His skin’s a different colour to everyone else’s and his language is a party trick that fumbles clumsily on his tongue. His classmates talk jokes he doesn’t understand and chatter about television shows he’s never heard of. His teacher makes a horrible squinting look when she gets to his name on the roll call, the one that never fails to send a chorus of mean laughter through the room.

The opportunity comes when she’s sick. The substitute arrives at his name, and when she pauses that dreadful pause, Takashi tightens his little shoulders.

She says his name, sounds it out, and it sounds all wrong. She laughs self-consciously and then goes, “Can I call you Shiro instead?”

And so Takashi becomes Shiro.

Shiro is the boy who makes friends easily. He’s the boy with a short name that sits simple on American tongues, the boy who fits in seamlessly at school. He takes easy to parse lunches to school, packs them in Tupperware instead of the wood bento that lie discarded in his cupboards.

Shiro is his great success.

But he can’t always be Shiro.

At the end of each day, when he returns home from school, his shadow lengthens and turns him into Takashi once more. There’s only one time that he tries to change that.

He’s ten and he hates bringing his friends over to play. “Can’t you call me Shiro?” he asks his mother. “Everyone else does, already!” He has a long list of reasons on a slip of paper in his back pocket which he thumbs at nervously.

His mom looks angry; her eyebrows are a thick, grown-up version of the way his dad says Takashi’s punch down when he’s upset.

“Do you know what your name means?” she demands. “Do you know what Shiro means?”

He shakes his head. She speaks fast, but when she’s mad it comes out jerky, an embarrassing mixture of English and Japanese.

They’ve been in the States for ten years but she still struggles with the words. His dad’s better; has a better grip on the language. Sometimes he laughs at the jokes Takashi makes.

Takashi laughs more often with his dad.

“Your grandfather helped to name you,” she says. “We looked for months for the perfect name for you. Why would you ever need a different name?”

“Do you know what Shiro means? Shiro means white. White means death!”

Takashi’s scared by how mad she looks. It’s only later when she comes by his door, and sets a plate of cut fruit by his table, that he sees her hands shake. She gathers him in a careful hug, and says, “No mother ever wants to bury their child.”

His mother is stern and blunt in her own way, quick to temper, rare to praise. She teaches him how to cut a vegetable, how to pick out the best, freshest groceries. At the shops, he’s Takashi, to whom passers-by smile and murmur, “You’re a good son,” as he struggles with the shopping cart.

He learns how to make udon soup; a homemade dashi infused with mushroom and chicken and fried tofu. He learns how to cook an egg three different ways, not including the type whisked at the last moment to scramble in the pot. His efforts are never quite the same; the noodles are too chewy, the flavours never balanced perfectly.

His mom hums when she eats it. “Thank you for cooking,” she says.

His dad smiles politely when he eats it. “Not bad,” he says, but never _good_.

*

Shiro is fourteen when he gives up on making udon. His right arm’s been achy lately, and it gets shivery when he has to hold up the saucepan for too long.

He’s fourteen when he realises doctors also wear masks.

The first episode happens when he’s at home, in the kitchen: he spills a pot as it bubbles over, his arm seizing and clenching and knotting up, and when he turns around his mother screams, “ _Takashi!_ ” once, and then again in real fear as he collapses to the tiles.

When he wakes up, it’s to a grey ceiling in a grey bed in a grey hospital, and the doctor who comes to him smiles kindly and pats him on the shoulder and tells him he’s going to be okay.

Later, when they think he’s asleep, the doctor speaks to his parents in a hushed whisper.

“…a very rare disease…not sure if we can treat it…may not live past thirty – ”

The harsh pressure of his parents’ shadows wane from that point. His dad’s mask cracks but doesn’t break; he hears his mom crying when it’s dark and the house turns quiet with the night. Their vulnerability is bittersweet with a metal cuff that feels like an anchor ringing his thin wrist.

They say things like: “You can do anything you like, Takashi,” or, “We support you.”

They never have the words to say what they mean. Not when they share half a language between the three of them. Not when the words, “That’s good,” or “Well done,” or “I love you,” are the wrong shape from the wrong country. So Shiro starts to swallow his words, too.

But not before he says, “I want to be an astronaut.”

“No,” his parents say. He knows what they mean. That’s not a ticket to a good life. That’s not the safe job that will take him comfortably to the end.

But Shiro doesn’t want safe. He doesn’t want comfortable. He doesn’t want to be stifled by expectations and words that sound like one thing but mean another.

He wants to dream.

The seed born from his careless words, thrown out with spite, take root and fill him with desperate longing.

He weighs up who he is and who he wants to be.

Takashi, the good son who cooks noodles and speaks scratchy Japanese to his mom and dad. The boy with good grades who will one day be a doctor or accountant. He attends language and culture school on Saturdays and forgets all the words but knows how to make a perfect pot of tea.

Takashi is the boy who’ll waste away before he’s thirty.

Shiro applies to the Garrison the next day.

*

The fact is, at seventeen years old, Shiro has perfected his personality.

No one at the Garrison speaks his old name – to each new cadet and officer he greets, he says, with a bright smile, “Call me Shiro.”

To those at the Garrison, Shiro is a bright spark. His dreams are grander than anyone he knows, and he’s a risk taker, but in a calculated way. He’s not afraid to dream big, because he has the skills and the push and the drive to take him all the way there. They see him smile and smile and push together his tasteless boiled vegetables on his stainless steel mess hall food tray. They see him eat bland mashed potatoes and joke about the texture.

They miss the way he chokes down the shitty curry and dry wrong-type-of-rice on International Fridays. Eventually, he chokes down the feeling of missing his mom’s cooking, too.

Shiro fills out. He becomes the kid with an endless supply of bad jokes. He’s a movie buff and is at the cinema most off-base weekends; on other free days, he’s strong and fast and plays football with the boys.

And he loves it. He loves the Garrison and the other cadets; he’s always been adaptable and he thrives under the right amount of attention. 

His calls with his parents become more and more infrequent. “I’m really busy,” he’ll say. “I’m falling behind on my homework.”

He’s not. He’s at the top of his class, at the top of each flight simulator scorecard, but if he says that it leaves himself open to another angle of imperfection. It’s always circles and politics; the little lie protects him.

“Are you eating well?” his mom will ask, peering through the tablet like she can make out his living habits through the lens pointed at the bland, inoffensive white space of his dorm wall. “You should make sure you’re eating your vegetables.”

“I will, mom,” he’ll say, “Thanks.”

Affection is such an ill-defined, tenuous thing between them; words of comfort always sit uncomfortably on their tongues. To avoid them, they’ll say things in endless metaphor and confusing strains and it aches at Shiro’s heart to have to try and untangle it all.

“Your parents worked so hard to get you an education,” his dad will say. “You should go back to your homework.”

*

When Shiro meets Adam, he’s shocked at the ease with which the three words slip through the other boy’s mouth like water. He makes it look as easy as breathing, and it’s just as easy for Shiro to fall in return.

Even if Shiro can never quite bring himself to say the words. They feel like something sacred and forbidden, locked up in his constricted throat. It’s just not said – the words are too powerful, they reverberate through the space between them like a threat. He soaks them up and shivers in the darkness when Adam presses them against his skin, into his ear.

Even so, as an officer, Shiro’s effusive with his praise, patient and forthcoming with compliments well deserved. It’s a rebellion; it’s proof of who he is now. 

*

Shiro meets Keith when he’s twenty-one, and he’s immediately fascinated.

Keith defies his first truth.

He’s an expert by now at cataloguing and deciphering masks. He wonders what the frumpy schoolteacher has to hide, but doesn’t have to wait long for her stern expression to fall way to simpering pride. Griffin, too, he reads with the ease of years of practice, beams polished and polite in front of Shiro, breaking away into mean giggles when he thinks he’s out of range.

At first, Shiro’s patient and kind with Keith. The boy’s drawn, wary, but he snaps at Shiro like a wild animal when he gets close, yet that’s brutally honest, too.

And that’s how Keith is with everyone. Shiro tries and tries but the pieces fall back the same way each time. Keith fights and bares his teeth and isn’t afraid to speak the truth, even when it gets him hurt. It’s like someone’s taken his mask and peeled it back so many layers that there isn’t anything left – nothing but a pulsing bright core of unrestrained honesty.

Shiro admires him for it as much as it puzzles him. And when Keith warms to him, it’s like a prickly flower unfurling its petals to the light; dangerous and beautiful all in one. It’s not a mask, how Keith is with Shiro, and the truth of it humbles Shiro’s soul. It’s Keith’s trust and the essence of himself. It’s how he’d be, given half a chance. It’s how he is, unrestrained and uninhibited.

*

Shiro shuffles his feet when he flicks on the video screen. The motion feels incongruous to the person he’s become, and if Adam was there, he’d surely express surprise over it.

“That’s not like you, Takashi,” he’d say, and Shiro would wince, once at the sentiment, again at the name. It would rumble across his lips, a faded copy of a copy that Shiro had once uttered to him.

He exchanges inane pleasantries with his dad when the line connects. The longer he stays at the Garrison, the further their language slips between his fingertips, and so he finds himself pausing often, sentences jerky and dull in a way that grates at all the unsaid things within him. When his mom joins them, he stutters more, an articulate tongue heavy as lead and mouth full of ash.

“Ah,” he says, when the silence stretches awkwardly. “I have something to say. I’m – I have a boyfriend now.”

The silence echoes.

“We’ve been together for three years. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. We’re serious. _I’m_ serious.”

They’ve been through a simulacrum of this scenario before.

Shiro had been reading a news article to his dad while his mom heated the pan; some heart-warming gooey feel-good story that made him smile as he read.

But his mom had rolled her eyes. “This story shouldn’t be in the news,” she’d said.

And Shiro had said, “Well, what if that was me? What if I was…”

“Don’t say that word,” his dad had interrupted.

“I’d tell you to leave this house,” his mom had added. 

Here at the Garrison, with two states between them, Shiro feels confident enough now. He says the words in English and his voice scores a line in the ground.

“I’m gay,” he says, and his parents’ eyes fill up.

“Think about your life, Takashi,” his mom begs.

“Think about your future,” his dad says. 

“I won’t have a future if I only do the things you say,” Shiro snaps, and jams the button to end the call. The digital motion doesn’t feel emphatic enough; he slams the datapad into his bed. It’s another slip from Shiro, but his parents have always been able to tease that part of him out.

That night, he eats half a deep dish pizza at the Garrison cafeteria and licks the tomato sauce from his fingers. He laughs with his friends and leaves behind his memories.

*

Shiro starts to question his truths when Keith proves him wrong again.

Shiro at the Garrison is all Keith’s ever known, but he’s perceptive to a fault when it comes to Shiro and so he wonders – he wonders just when Keith found his cracks, and widened them open enough to jam his fingers straight into his heart.

The day after Shiro cuts contact with his parents, Keith comes by his room and elbows through his door like he belongs there.

“Can we go out to the desert?” he says simply, and Shiro has to laugh. It’s Friday and he’s been avoiding the cafeteria.

Shiro beats Keith to their favourite dusty outcropping, but it’s only because he’d gunned it while Keith had been fiddling with the seat of his hoverbike as they were leaving the garage. He still slams his goggles up and grins, though, because it just means Keith’ll try twice as hard the next time they race.

Keith doesn’t look angry or even ruffled when he climbs off his bike, though. He flicks the engine off and pops the seat up to grab at something inside the trunk. “Give me a hand?” he says, muffled from where half his body is obscured by the boot.

Bemused, Shiro jogs over, and he’s floored to find a feast of styrofoam boxes and plastic cutlery nestled in the bottom of Keith’s hoverbike.

Keith throws a blanket at him. “Go and find a space,” he orders, struggling with the boxes.

“What _is_ all this?” Shiro says in wonder, when they’ve settled down and the lids have all been discarded. There, lined in saran wrap, is a paper takeaway cup still steaming with the miso soup it contains. Strewn haphazardly across the blanket are piles of food – stir fried yakisoba, steamed pork buns; further across, greasy street food and mouth-wateringly seared yakitori. The Garrison gives its cadets a weekly stipend – but Keith must have _saved_ for this.

Keith shrugs. He struggles a bit with the wooden chopsticks and ends up spearing the takoyaki instead. “I didn’t feel like shitty Friday specials,” he says around a mouthful of octopus. Then, more quietly, a little awkwardly: “You looked like you needed a break.”

Shiro is strong. Shiro is charismatic and nothing eats away at the confidence he wraps around himself like a cloak. But in that moment, even though Keith’s known nothing but Shiro, he could swear he sees past every layer of him, right to the faded little boy in his heart.

Shiro-at-the-Garrison has two reasonable goals: to be the best, and to touch the stars. They’re reasonable because he’s working to a deadline. Keith’s unfailing honesty unravels something in him. It lets him think he wouldn’t mind taking a detour on the way.

Later, when the plates have been cleared and Shiro’s pleasantly full of food that isn’t homemade but strikes unfairly home, Keith hesitates, then passes over a final box to him, a little metal tin with a corner that’s been dinged and scratched. “Go on,” Keith says. He brings his knees up to his chest.

Shiro opens the box, and the scent that wafts up to him is pure chocolate. They’re cookies, a little misshapen and wonky, but when Shiro bites into one, it’s decadently gooey and sweet.

“Sorry,” Keith says when Shiro looks at him, eyes bright. “I didn’t know how to make any Japanese desserts, but I’ve made these before with my pop, so – ” 

“Keith,” Shiro says. “You made these for me?”

Keith flushes. “Yeah,” he says. “The kitchens were free…”

Shiro beams at him. “It’s good, Keith,” he says, and Keith hides in his knees. “It’s really good.”

And just like that, Shiro-at-the-Garrison makes way to Shiro-with-Keith. His edges are a bit softer. He doesn’t talk movies, or make stupid pop references, because Keith only blinks confusedly up at him each time. And when Keith stumbles on the truth behind his medical bracelets, it’s almost a relief to add the ability to be vulnerable to this new mask. 

Shiro flits between the two for the remainder of his time at the Garrison.

*

When Adam leaves, Shiro is defeated but not surprised. Adam loves the good parts about Shiro, disapproves of his goals. He loves him in a safe way, like his parents had, too.

“It’s like I barely know who you are anymore, Takashi,” Adam says softly.

Shiro’s beginning to think that he’s not quite sure who he is, either.

*

All masks fall secondary to the Champion.

The Champion is vicious. The Champion doesn’t yield. The Champion is all the brutality and unspoken rage and depths of cruelty that had ever existed in his body.

The Champion is his fury at his eviscerated freedom.

The Champion protects Shiro when he cries alone at night in his cell, invisible blood, innocent and guilty alike, pooling in his fingers and cascading onto the cold metal ground. 

He’s what Shiro has to lock away when he crashes back to Earth, sealing away memories of a crueller him, no chance to embed himself any further in his wounded psyche. He’s scared of what he can do uninhibited.

It’s what makes Shiro throw himself into the role of a leader, a paladin. It comes naturally at this point; he’s well-practised for it and he slips into that persona with such ease it’s like he was born for it.

He trains with the others. He’s strict but kind, but above all, he’s responsible. He dutifully eats the food goo he’s served, then, with more passion when Hunk learns how to flavour it with an alien root that tastes just like the seven spice blend of his childhood.

The most important thing is that he survives.

Until he doesn’t.

*

There’s something comforting about the astral plane once the initial shock wears off. After he’s spent, confused at first, then begging and screaming and crying. None of it changes his fate, so he lets himself float in the aether. 

He’s released from every persona that ever once existed in him. No universal rules in a universe of one. No hopes, no duties, no dreams, no ambitions.

Nothing is true. Nothing is false.

If he could just close his eyes…

…and drift…

*

Shiro spends a long time categorising the differences between his new body and his original one.

His hair, white like the death that’s touched him.

His body, scarred in unfamiliar places, smooth in others.

His arm, a monstrous, twisted stump.

His memories – a jumble of scenes like looking through a fogged window.

He’s his own ship of Theseus, a conundrum that had started with his arm and ended as a virus that spread over his entire soul. If each part of his body has been replaced, what claim does he have to being Shiro?

He begins to think of himself as the New Shiro.

The New Shiro isn’t a mask. It isn’t a conscious choice. It just is.

What claim does he have to his older iterations, past memories belonging to a paladin; a leader; a pilot; a son?

He throws himself into his new duties as Captain; it’s what little he can stake as his. No longer a paladin, he can still carve out a place for himself. The words, _I love you_ , flit through his mind at night like a half-forgotten dream, and anguished, terrified, he tosses them away, relegated to another time, another _him_.

And, he thinks, even if he is a mask, it’s the only thing he knows. It is him.

After the war is over, Shiro assigns himself a small apartment off-base. He cooks soft-boiled eggs to near perfect consistency and attends Coalition meetings when he’s called. He’s dutiful and hard-working and performs exactly as he’s expected to.

He doesn’t expect Keith to barge into his apartment, standing and scowling in his living space like he belongs there.

“The war’s over, Shiro,” he says, low and raspy, “So why aren’t you with us celebrating?”

Shiro turns the heat down. The gas stove is a luxury he hasn’t had since –

Since a lifetime ago.

“It’s okay, Keith,” he says reasonably. “You should celebrate with your friends – don’t worry about me.”

Keith looks like he’s been slapped. Shiro can’t puzzle why.

“ _You’re_ my friend,” he hisses.

“Someone with my face once was,” Shiro says. “That’s not me. I think I’m new.”

Keith’s face crumples. “But you’re still you,” he whispers. “I saved you. Why would you – what happened to _you_ , then?”

Shiro smiles like he’s not in pain. Keith wants to know about the other him, the Shiro-with-Keith that Keith loves.

So he explains.

He tells Keith about the three truths. He tells Keith about Takashi, about Shiro, about the Champion. He tells him about New Shiro. His heart creaks and aches but he has to explain.

“You remember everything?” Keith asks with a trembling voice. “Everything from when you were growing up?”

Shiro nods.

Keith’s crying. Neither the sound nor the sight is familiar, but Shiro moves forward automatically anyway, and his arms are a perfect fit around Keith’s back. His hand strokes up and down, up and down into silence.

“I think you’ve been looking for a place to belong for so long,” Keith whispers, “That you’ve missed all the people already here to accept you for everything you are.”

Shiro trembles. He doesn’t know what to do except hold on tighter.

“It’s you,” Keith says. “It’s always been you. No matter who you’re with or what you do – you can hide parts of yourself away for different people to protect yourself, but you’ve friends out there who love you, for everything you are.”

“I don’t think I know who I am,” Shiro says.

Keith laughs into his tears. “Everything you remember is you,” he says. His arms are strong, so strong winding around Shiro.

“Friends who love me,” Shiro repeats softly. “Including you?”

Keith swallows. “Yes, Shiro,” he says. “I – I do. I love you. I always have.”

Shiro wants to say the words back, but they’re lodged in his throat. Keith looks up at him, his expression dimming, and the self-loathing that washes through Shiro makes him wonder how he could have ever thought that none of this was real, was his.

“I do – I do too,” Shiro chokes out, carding his fingers clumsily through Keith’s hair. “I want to say it, too, I swear I do, but I – I’ve never – it never comes out.”

He holds on against the tidal wave washing him away. “Let me cook you lunch,” he croaks. “Please don’t go.”

Keith holds him like an anchor. “I won’t leave,” he says, and stays – for lunch, for dinner, and then for days and weeks after that.

*

Shiro receives a message on his datapad a month into the tentative thing that’s his second, his third chance at living. The message is simple; a missive that his parents are alive.

“Do you want to see them?” Keith asks. “No one has the right to judge you if you don’t.”

Unsaid are the words, “ _You don’t need to pretend to be someone you’re not_.”

With Keith, Shiro’s learning that it’s okay to be bitter; it’s okay to be selfish. Those are aspects of the man named Takashi Shirogane, the good, the ugly, and the truthful. And Keith has always been true.

Keith knows they haven’t spoken in years. He’s known ever since he became the single beneficiary of Shiro’s Survivor’s Pension after the failed Kerberos mission.

It’s selfish, but Shiro still asks, because it’s okay. It’s okay now. “Will you come with me?’

Keith hangs back when Shiro knocks on the door. It’s not the same house he remembers, not even the same state, but he’s not surprised with how much destruction was wrought during the invasion. Somehow, the move makes Shiro feel a little lighter; unstifled by the weight of expectation.

When the door opens, it’s to a man Shiro remembers as being taller, younger, broader.

“Takashi,” his dad breathes, with the proper inflection, and Shiro feels ten years rewind in an instant.

They walk into the garden. His mom keeps stealing glances at him as they walk. Amongst the trees and flowers, Keith retains a respectful distance.

They catalogue each other’s changed light-heartedly: Shiro’s hair matches his mom’s – (“We are both Shiro, now,” she says, smiling) – and his dad’s laughter lines are carved into his cheeks now. Their English flows better on their tongues now than Shiro remembers, as much as Japanese words melt damningly on his. It’s halting, rusty, but all of them have been through a war; there’s nothing to it but to adapt.

Something settles in Shiro at the way his parents recognise him – it confirms that he’s real, that he belongs. It’s strange that he only feels that way a death and a half later, when all of his life he’s had both feet spanning an impossible gulf, living in one half fraying his connection to the other. 

But Shiro’s all of him, now. Keith’s broken all of his rules and taught him how to be himself. He wants, but remembers a time when he’d been unwanted.

“I’m still who I am,” Shiro says, and the words are a revelation to himself. They strengthen his resolve. “If you can’t accept that, then stop trying to care about me again. It won’t work.”

His mom steps forward. She’s always been blunt; when she drops the mask of public face, she never says any less than how she feels.

“Takashi,” she says now. “We never stopped caring about you. We never stopped loving you.”

Shiro stares. He’s hardly certain his ears heard her right.

His mom smiles, sadly. “I buried an empty casket once, I can’t let you go again,” she whispers. “Your mother loves you Takashi, _I_ love you. I’m proud of you. I’m so sorry you’ve been waiting so long for me to say it.”

His dad holds his mom as she cries; Shiro feels his eyes well over too. “Bring your boyfriend over here,” he says. “Let’s make lunch together.”

When Shiro follows them inside, it’s with the knowledge that there are no universal truths at all, there never were. Not when his parents, twenty years on, can offer him the gift of understanding.

They make gyoza in the kitchen together.

“Ground pork and cabbage and shiitake are Takashi’s favourite,” his mom tells Keith proudly. She has the fillings in a stirring bowl.

His dad kneads the dough into wrappers. He’s never been a good cook, but his hands are limber and fast and he knows the prettiest ways to fold them.

“I can help,” Shiro hears Keith say, a little tentatively. “How do I do it?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” his mom says with a smirk. “You just need to stir it well. I hope you have a strong arm.”

“Oh,” Keith echoes, and seems to gain some of his confidence back. “Yeah, that’s easy.”

They smile at each other, and Shiro’s heart lurches.

Keith’s a fast learner, just as he is with everything. The filling is tirelessly mixed to his mom’s exacting standards; blended smoothly into submission.

They sit at the table to fold, the four of them, his dad instructing Keith how to wet the outside edge first, how to press the dough firmly together and pinch it to the centre. Keith’s quick fingers pleat the skins, wobbly at first, but better and better with each dumpling that joins the tray. Not quite as fast as Shiro’s dad – but it’s close.

The gyoza tastes better than Shiro remembers.

The uncooked leftovers are bundled into plastic containers. Shiro tries to protest, but his mom has a way of sneaking them past him, finding his weak spot in Keith’s confused hands.

As he’s packing the boxes begrudgingly away, Shiro sees Keith pause on the threshold, saying something to his mom. His mom’s eyes widen and she whispers something in his ear, Keith’s brow crinkling as he bends in to hear. He takes his datapad out, and that’s all Shiro sees before his dad hands him a bag of his old things and he has to bend down and shuffle it into the trunk.

*

“I’m thinking of taking some language classes,” Shiro says, curled up on the couch.

Keith straightens, looking over from where he’s standing next to the oven. He’s got the mitts out, and a dollop of chocolate rests high on his cheek.

“That sounds nice,” he says, casually. “What’s the occasion?”

Shiro shifts, pensive. “I guess,” he says slowly, “Now seems as good a time as any. There are so many forgotten words that I’ve never wanted back until now. And I guess there’s a special kind of shame when your own name sounds unfamiliar to you…”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Keith says softly.

Shiro gets off the couch, pads over to Keith and peers into the oven. The cookies are almost done, the wafting scent of chocolate only barely contained by the glass door.

“I got used to everyone saying it wrong that I gave up trying to correct it,” Shiro admits. “There was no point when I felt like an impostor saying it myself.”

There’s a lull, quiet enough that Shiro blinks, turning to face Keith.

His mouth is tucked into a shy, awkward smile. “Takashi,” Keith says, just the way his parents say it, but it’s curved with a softness in his voice that wisps shivers through Shiro’s body. Each syllable is coloured with warmth, like honey that seeps into Shiro’s bones.

He reaches out for Keith, who meets him halfway; their bodies come together quietly, and so, so gently.

The words bubble up in his throat, and Shiro lets them fall.

“I love you,” Shiro whispers into Keith’s hair, and Keith grips him tighter and tighter. “I love you, I love you.”

And there, laid bare at last, Shiro realises: there are no universal truths in this world; just the press of soft hair against his cheek, and the smell of butter and sweet chocolate filling the room.

**Author's Note:**

> I can never express how thrilled I was to find an Asian lead character in Western media - someone whose ethnicity simply was, because it could be. On the other hand, I will always think that they could have done better, they could have explored more. Why wasn't he given a family? Why weren't his parents at the launch? For someone growing up in an Asian household, my parents wouldn't have missed it for the world, unless something huge was stopping them - or if they were dead (but I don't want to think about that).
> 
> If you liked this story, if any of it resonated with you, I would love to know.
> 
> [tumblr](https://morthael.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/anuveon)


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